End Genocide - Recognize Past Genocides

(April 1915) Armenian civilians, escorted by armed Ottoman soldiers, are marched through Harput, to a prison in the nearby Mezireh.

There were an estimated two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire before the First World War. Approximately one and a half million Armenians were killed from 1915-1923. The remaining part was either islamized or exiled.

The first phase of the Armenian Genocide was the conscription of about 60,000 Armenian men into the Ottoman army, their disarmament and murder by their Turkish fellow soldiers.

The second phase of the extermination of the Armenian population started on April 24, 1915 with the arrest of several hundred Armenian intellectuals and representatives of national elite (mainly in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople) and their subsequent elimination. Hereinafter, Armenians worldwide started to commemorate the Armenian genocide on April 24.

The third phase of the genocide is characterized with the exile of the massacres of women, children, elderly people to the desert of Syria. Hundreds of thousands of people were murdered by Turkish soldiers, police officers, Kurdish bandits during the deportation. The others died of epidemic diseases. Thousands of women and children were subjected to violence. Tens of thousands were forcibly islamized.

The fifth phase is the universal and absolute denial of the Turkish government of the mass deportations and genocide carried out against Armenians in their homeland. Despite the ongoing process of international condemnation of the Armenian Genocide, Turkey fights against recognition by all means, including distortion of history, means of propaganda, lobbying activities and other measures.

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

On December 9, 1948 the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, that defines genocide as an international crime. The signatory states are obliged to prevent and punish the perpetrators.

According to the Convention, a genocide is one of the following acts aiming to completely or partially exterminate a national, ethnic, racial or religious group:

Murder of the members of a group

Serious bodily or mental harm to the members of a group

Deliberate creation of such living conditions for a group that brings about its complete or partial physical extermination.

Implementation of measures aimed at preventing birth rates within the group